Tea Party Leader Mark Williams: Hoist With His Own Petard

Here’s Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams on the Anderson Cooper show, denying there are any extremists at the tea parties, they’re just a tiny minority of fringe elements, no racists, only a few Obama-with-a-bone-through-his-nose pictures, everything’s just fine.

Cooper: Mark, what you’re saying makes sense to me here … but then I read on your blog, you say … you call the President an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug, and a racist in chief.

Williams: Yeah!

Cooper: Is that the kind of …

Williams: That’s the way he’s behaving!

Cooper: But … but …

[David Gergen and James Carville start laughing in astonishment…]

Williams: I mean if he cares to be the President of the whole country ….

Cooper: Do you really believe he’s Indonesian? Do you really believe he’s a Muslim? Do you really believe he’s a welfare thug?

Williams: I… I… he’s certainly acting like it.

Gergen: You think he’s a racist in chief? Racist in chief? Is that what you call him? A racist in chief? It’s unbelievable.

Williams: Until he embraces the rest of this country, what else can I conclude?

The amazing thing is that even when his own blatantly racist, bigoted remarks are brought up and thrown in his face, he doesn’t say something like, “OK, maybe that was a little over the top, but we need to focus on the real issues… yadda yadda.” You know, the kind of political spinning almost everyone knows how to do these days.

Nope. He proudly stands by his “sekrit Moslem welfare thug” rant, and refuses to back down.

The word remains in modern usage in the phrase hoist with one’s own petard, which means “to be harmed by one’s own plan to harm someone else” or “to fall into one’s own trap”, literally implying that one could be lifted up (hoist, or blown upward) by one’s own bomb.